Jim Piddock

Piddock trained at Drama Studio London, took a degree at King's College London, and moved to the United States in his early twenties. His American debut was a one-man show, The Boy's Own Story, in San Francisco, and Broadway followed with Present Laughter, Noises Off, The Knack and Design for Living. Four decades later he is still working, as an actor, a writer and a producer.

Screen audiences know him best from the Christopher Guest improvised comedies, where he is the designated Englishman and, more importantly, the straight man. In Best in Show he commentates the dog show as Trevor Beckwith, patiently supplying real information alongside a colleague who has none, and the restraint is the joke: he gets almost no punchlines and the sequence collapses without him. He turns up again in A Mighty Wind, For Your Consideration and Mascots, and he co-created and appeared in the series Family Tree.

The rest is a long and unfussy character career on both sides of the Atlantic. He is the prosecutor in The Prestige, Alfred in the animated Batman: Under the Red Hood, a headmaster in Austin Powers in Goldmember, a priest in The Haunting of Bly Manor, and, in a stretch of late-2000s spoof films, Magneto. He is the sort of actor whose face you place three scenes before you place the name.